Many of today's handheld devices make use of wireless “connections” for telephony, digital-data transfer, geographical positioning, and the like. Despite differences in frequency spectra, modulation methods and spectral power densities, the wireless connectivity standards use synchronized data packets to transmit and receive data. In general, all of these wireless capabilities are defined by industry-approved standards (e.g., IEEE 802.11 and 3GPP LTE) which specify the parameters and limits to which devices having those capabilities must adhere.
At any point along the device-development continuum, it may be necessary to test and verify that a device is operating within its standards' specifications. Most such devices are transceivers, that is, they transmit and receive wireless RF signals. Specialized systems designed for testing such devices typically contain subsystems designed to receive and analyze device-transmitted signals (e.g., vector signal analyzers or VSAs) and to send signals (e.g., vector signal generators or VSGs) that subscribe to the industry-approved standards so as to determine whether a device is receiving and processing the wireless signals in accordance with its standards.
There are testers in use that have a single VSA and VSG and are designed to test the physical characteristics associated with one wireless standard. There are also testers that have a plurality of VSAs and VSGs and are designed to concurrently test wireless physical characteristics of two or more different and non-interfering standards.
Testers having a plurality of VSAs and VSGs, and designed for concurrent testing, are typically controlled by external or internal control subsystems that, in turn, execute a user-defined test program. However, such testers are not designed to perform as hardware real-time test-programs or measurement processors, that is, they are not designed to execute an arbitrarily user-defined sequence of standard instrument commands in an atomic and deterministic manner across all of the independent modules of a tester, automatically, through internally coordinated interactions of the tester firmware and hardware components for direct real-time interaction with the device under test.
If a tester comprising a plurality of VSAs and VSGs and analysis modules could be outfitted with a system and method for coordinating the interactions of its firmware and hardware components such that it could automatically execute commands across its independent modules in an atomic and deterministic fashion, then the tester would be able to execute piecemeal (e.g., one-off) commands and measurements or a sequence of measurement-related commands in the same atomic and deterministic manner.
A tester equipped, as described, could be programmed by simply giving it a sequence of the standard measurement and analysis commands of the instrument, in any order. This, in turn, could make programming such a real-time, deterministic measurement system simpler and faster, and result in increased testing efficiency and lower overall test cost.